I had never seen The L Word before this summer, and then I came across the first season on DVD at the public library, so I checked it out. Of course I was put off by the rich skinny women, but since there’s no chance of a TV series starring only women who look like Lea DeLaria, I just ‘read’ past them as it were and enjoyed the series more than I expected. (Ditto for tea’s rhetorical question about depicting LA as the working-class multiracial city it really is: it’s not gonna happen on TV.) Thanks to the city and university libraries, I’m now in the middle of Season 4.

I think I agree with Alison. I’ve never been able to watch Queer as Folk, and I think that the L Word doesn’t bother me because I’m NOT a lesbian, or a woman, which “allows me to just completely detach and not take anything personally, even the absurd [gay male] moments. It’s deeply relaxing.” (Hey — isn’t Alan Cumming the most annoying actor around today?)

If anything, the producers’ attempts to cover Serious Issues and Our Community’s Diversity (Breast Cancer! Bisexuality! Transguys!) bother me more than the unreal upscaleness of the central characters. I see them trying to include a wider range of women, though it’s just not very convincing. And I agree that the writing and direction are very uneven, but I happen to like Rose Troche and Gwyn Turner, so I generally enjoy their contributions more. To each her own.

And yet, one thing I’ve enjoyed while watching, as a longtime DTWOF fan, was comparing the way the L word handled topics and issues compared to the way Alison does. Sometimes I wondered (and I don’t think it’s impossible, I’m sure that at least some of them have read the strip) if the producers went through the DTWOF archives and made a checklist of issues they should cover. Almost everything they did reminded me of this or that strip.

I disagree with Josh when he writes that “I’m not sure who exactly the show is trying to appeal to. Is there actually a cohort of affluent-to-rich lipstick lesbians who buy into the ideology that this show is selling?” It appears to me that a lot of lesbians do watch and like the show. Why do you assume that characters must be exactly like the audience? After all, Alison isn’t like those rich white women on Sex in the City, yet she likes that show. The interaction of audience with content is extremely complex.

Also, I’ve been skeptical of this kind of complaint ever since I heard other gay men attack The Boys in The Band for its supposedly unrealistic portrayal of gay men — yet those who complained the loudest were, to my eyes, the most like Crowley’s characters. Or other men who attacked books like “Dancer from the Dance” because they supposedly had absolutely nothing to do with their lives — yet those men drank and cruised a lot, just less in a midwestern college town than they could have done in Manhattan. So the more vehemently they distanced themselves from Holleran’s world, the more I wondered about their motives.

None of this is to say that The L Word is great art, or even great entertainment. But it is better than I expected.

More and more about that show appears to be ridiculously untrue to lesbian life as I watch it. In the third season it’s clear that “lesbians” (the L Word ones) don’t consider gay men to be “real men”. Since they cut out the extended, graphic heterosex in each episode after the first season, I’m not sure who exactly the show is trying to appeal to. Is there actually a cohort of affluent-to-rich lipstick lesbians who buy into the ideology that this show is selling?

I haven’t read all the posts but someone must have already made note that SATC is so enjoyable because the characters are actually deliberately constructed as queens disguised as straight women. By the same token, The L Word is just as fantastic (and I mean that literally–it is fantasy) and not to be taken seriously either and enjoyed on its own merits or lack thereof.

ciao, ciao

For those who didn’t grow up on American televsion: The phrase refers to the point when a (say) a TV series can officially be said to have moved from “has remained on the air too long” to “the status of self-parody” (or just plain silly).

Specifically it refers to an episode in the old American sit-com “Happy Days” (this was a “nostalgic” comedy set in the 1950s, and was roughly based on the movie “American Graffitti”).

Anyway, in the episode a character (Fonzie or “The Fonz”) literally jumps (on water skis) over a container containing a live shark.

If you’re _really_ interested, you can see it here on-line:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpraJYnbVtE

(As a member of the ‘the L-Word stresses me out’ (or would if I gave it the time of day) school, one of the things I remember from one of the episodes i did catch was a strap-on scene by a swimming pool – not that that stressed me out…).

Now DTWOF. There’s some lesbian representation that doesn’t stress me out!

so..mm… i don’t think we yield that one to the straight boys.

or their depictions / fantasies of us.

;>